How good are your backups?

April 07, 2012

I came downstairs this morning, and sat at my computer to check out Facebook and do some clicking around, and OSX kindly informed me that my main Storage drive was no longer writable, and would I kindly format it to resolve the issue.

Wait – what?!

That storage drive is a 6tb Firewire 800 Western Digital beast. It’s relatively new. Oh, and it has all of my Aperture libraries and iMovie archives. Format *what* ???

I tried using disk repair, but apparently it doesn’t like RAID drives. I tried running some of the disk utility commands from a command prompt, with no joy or change. I also had a shoot today, so I knew I would be leaving shortly and would need that drive when I got back home – with several memory cards full of gigs and gigs of photos.

It’s times like this you start to wonder how good your backup routine really is …

I’ve been using Apertures built in Vault system to archive my photos off to a secondary drive. I also have a cloud backup system that is currently, slowly, uploading my stuff to the magic cloud. Vaults were going to have to be my saviour.

I had a couple of things on the drive that weren’t backed up with Vault, so I moved them off to any space I could find – then after getting back from my shoot I hit the magic “format” button and wiped the drive out. *GULP*

Happily, I’m here to report that the Vault worked just fine, and I now have a full copy of the libraries ready to go, no hassle, no sweat – well, other than from me.

Turns out the problem was a permissions issue – the drive is healthy and happy. Now to buy another layer of drive backups! …